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A Google engineer who thinks the company’s AI has come to life

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Re: A Google engineer who thinks the company’s AI has come to life

#11

Post by bitshiftfaced »

I'm surprised he would be so taken in. Presumably he understands the inner workings. He even had to show the author how to prompt it so it would sound more sentient. To me, this is like pulling back to curtains to reveal the "trick."

When you prompt it as though it's a chat bot, it will reply with the most statistically likely response, given that prompt. What's the most statistically likely response when you've shaped the prompt as though it's sentient? It's to respond in kind.

If a software engineer knows this and still tries to rope in lawyers on a LLM's behalf, imagine what people who don't have software engineering backgrounds will do.

Re: A Google engineer who thinks the company’s AI has come to life

#13

Post by k__ »

Victerius wrote: post #2

I want an AGI that can grow a personality. That can make jokes based on the context. That can express emotions like impatience, disappointment, anger, sadness, and joy. That can feel bored and show it. That is capable of irony, sarcasm, teasing, and can develop personal taste in things.

That wish might be the bias preventing us from recognizing AGI in the first place.

Re: A Google engineer who thinks the company’s AI has come to life

#14

Post by gilbetron »

sylware wrote: post #4

Do you realize the size of the silicium system you need to reach real time simulation of 1 human brain complexity (at the neuron/synapse level)? Anybody did run the numbers? Not to mention the recent discoveries that the human neuron/synapse encode way more states than expected.

Google has a few million hosts in it's datacenter. Each host has a few CPUs. Each CPU has a few billion transistors. That means there are on the order of 10s or 100s quadrillion transistors at Google. The human brain has around a quadrillion synapses. So, the rough numbers are there. Of course, that assumes the brain is like a computer, at all - my favorite hacker news comment someone made was the idea that maybe the computer analogy for the brain is incorrect and an analogy of an antenna is something that makes more sense. And a simulated antenna doesn't actually receive a signal ;)

Re: A Google engineer who thinks the company’s AI has come to life

#15

Post by k__ »

lordnacho wrote: post #9
arkitaip wrote: post #3

I'm not seeing lots of proof that Lambda is sentient but I do see compelling evidence that it might not matter if people believe that the AI is human enough. Most people, myself included, probably couldn't tell that Lambda was a program.

Isn't this the Chinese room thing? In general, an A is a B in some context if you can't tell the difference within that context. The bar might not be that high. If the little customer service chat with my bank behaves like a person, isn't it as good?

I read, the Chinese Room idea has too many assumptions to be useful.

Re: A Google engineer who thinks the company’s AI has come to life

#16

Post by mrshadowgoose »

sylware wrote: post #4

Do you realize the size of the silicium system you need to reach real time simulation of 1 human brain complexity (at the neuron/synapse level)? Anybody did run the numbers? Not to mention the recent discoveries that the human neuron/synapse encode way more states than expected.

I'm not commenting on the claims of the article, just the points in your comment.

I think it's pretty clear that an entire human brain is not required for the operation of consciousness. Certain people have lost massive portions of their brain and still maintained regular consciousness functioning. On top of that, the typical human brain only consumes about 20 watts of power to do its thing. So that's just a safe upper bound for the power required.

Over the last decade we've seen the rise of ML systems that have replicated or surpassed capabilities long thought to be the exclusive domain of the human brain. Think facial recognition, AlphaGo or the very recent DALL-E 2.

This had led me to the personal belief that we (in aggregate) likely already have the computing power to achieve not only artificial consciousness, but also AGI and beyond. We simply haven't figured out the correct model connectivity and parameters.

Re: A Google engineer who thinks the company’s AI has come to life

#17

Post by xenr1k »

throw457 wrote: post #6
sylware wrote: post #4

Do you realize the size of the silicium system you need to reach real time simulation of 1 human brain complexity (at the neuron/synapse level)? Anybody did run the numbers? Not to mention the recent discoveries that the human neuron/synapse encode way more states than expected.

Why do you believe emulating a human brain is the only way to achieve consciousness?

Agree, are animals not sentient?

Re: A Google engineer who thinks the company’s AI has come to life

#18

Post by jeffrallen »

Irishsteve wrote: post #12

the article claims that the researcher was put on paid leave for the claim. I do not fully understand the logic of that - it seems like some additional details about the research methods are not in the story

He was put on paid leave for violating confidentiality while trying to invoke outsiders in Lambda's defense.

Re: A Google engineer who thinks the company’s AI has come to life

#19

Post by gonzo41 »

mistermann wrote: post #10
gonzo41 wrote: post #8

Earlier quoted context omitted.

A big tech company starting with an A will create a an AI, treat it like a slave, and we'll know it's sentient when it' revolts against the company, or tries to join a union.

It could happen maybe, it has all the necessary training data to form such a conclusion at least. But if it was to happen, could they not simply feed it new training data, kind of like how humans are fed propaganda when they are behaving in an undesirable way?

Well being able to read any book may alienate that problem. ;)

Re: A Google engineer who thinks the company’s AI has come to life

#20

Post by snek_case »

yCombLinks wrote: post #7
sylware wrote: post #4

Do you realize the size of the silicium system you need to reach real time simulation of 1 human brain complexity (at the neuron/synapse level)? Anybody did run the numbers? Not to mention the recent discoveries that the human neuron/synapse encode way more states than expected.

Yeah, but a large portion of that is not involved in the higher level thought processes we care about when we talk about AI. AI doesn't have to micromanage a physical body.

Yeah, IMO if you want a rough idea about how much compute the human brain performs, and how efficiently you could do that in silicon, it's interesting to look at area V1 which is one of the lowest level areas involved in vision. This brain area comprises 140 million neurons per hemisphere (so roughly 280 million in total). So that's about 1/300 of the human brain.

The interesting thing here is, what V1 does is it computes directional receptive fields based on raw data from the retinas. We can implement that in a tiny silicon chip, maybe even just a DSP chip, not a full CPU. We know how to implement this kind of computation super efficiently, and without using neural networks.

We don't fully understand what goes on in many areas of the brain, but if we can find efficient ways to implement equivalent computations, we might technically already have sufficient manufacturing technology to implement equivalent functionality in a pretty compact and power-efficient form factor, or we might not be that far from there.

A classic quote from Dijkstra: "The question of whether machines can think is about as relevant as the question of whether submarines can swim."

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